Tanking Majordomo Staghelm

And so, we come to the penultimate boss of the normal mode Firelands raid.

Majordomo Staghelm is the final roadblock on your way to facing off against Ragnaros and completing at least the normal version of this instance so grab your shield (or your two-hander…or your big, furry bear behind) and let’s get started.

The Staghelm fight comes in roughly two phases, with the control over the transition of these phases being left up to your raid group. The thing about this fight that marks it as quite a bit different than the other fights in the instance is that there are little to no tank-specific duties to take care of. While you will be collapsing and spreading out with your raid, there isn’t too much that you as a tank have to do save for making sure that Staghelm faces towards the raid and popping cooldowns as required.

Whether he will be in his Scorpion or his Cat form will depend on how tightly your raid is stacked up. When the large portion of your raid is collapsed, he will be attacking you in his Scorpion form. When you spread out, he will shift into his Cat form.

The queue to shift his forms comes in the form of a buff that stacks on the boss. Once it reaches a certain level, it becomes nearly impossible to keep the raid up from this damage so that would be your queue to spread out or group up.

A few things that you personally need to keep in mind are things that everyone else needs to keep an eye on. In between his phases, he’ll stun the raid and cast Searing Seeds on everybody except for the tank. This debuff will detonate at a random time, anywhere from ten seconds to a minute. While this debuff isn’t cast on tank it’s important to note that as it’s cast on everyone else, randomly straying into the path of any raid member trying to get away from the group is strictly a bad idea.

Also, because there will be an awful lot of raid damage at this point, keep a ready finger on your cooldowns in case a bit of tank damage catches your healers napping.

As far as the Firelands bosses go, Staghelm is a fairly simple fight that just might require a bit of practice with the execution of the fight.

While it seems pretty simple on paper, trying to get your raid to move to specific locations exactly when you need them to can be a lot like herding cats and so it might take a bit before everyone is comfortable enough with the strategy to move accordingly when the time is right.

Comments

“While you will be collapsing and spreading out with your raid, there isn’t too much that you as a tank have to do save for making sure that Staghelm faces away from the raid and popping cooldowns as required.”

Shouldn’t he be pointed *AT* the raid during the Scorpion phase? Or is there some magical mechanic I’m missing here?

During Cat phase, I just let the melee DPS run around behind him, since everyone else is gone and he keeps shifting locations.